Instead, parliament immediately rushed through bipartisan legislation to validate ICAC’s excesses.

Putting aside the curious resignation of Premier O’Farrell over a bottle of wine, had they forgotten that the first of many innocents the monster devoured was its unsuspecting parent, Nick Greiner?

CORRUPTION

As argued here, our ancient legal system provides tried and tested machinery to deal with corruption allegations. This is the grand jury.

Unlike most of the anglosphere, grand juries have survived in the US, because they are constitutionally entrenched.

So if ICAC is to continue, parliament should abolish its powers to hold communist-style show trials and to declare guilt.

If after investigating allegations of corruption, a reformed ICAC believed it had evidence of corruption, a grand jury, chosen at random, would be empanelled to consider the indictment (written accusation).

After hearing the evidence, the grand jury would decide by majority whether there was “probable cause” to believe a crime had been committed.

If so, the foreman would mark the indictment as “a true bill” and the case would be heard openly by a judge and jury.

If not, it would be marked “no bill”, with the process forever remaining confidential.

If instead of strengthening ICAC in 2016, parliament had accepted this column’s advice (my students could have drafted the bill) the first we would have heard of the allegations against Berejiklian would have been if the foreman had marked the indictment as a true bill and the case had gone to a judge and jury.

Former Premier Berejiklian has been much praised. But whatever she did, she hardly “saved Australia from the virus”.

With the national cabinet, which later misread the already exaggerated modelling, she rejected world’s best practice and chose instead the solution preferred by the Chinese Communist Party, the unnecessarily cruel and wasteful lockdown.

LOCKDOWN

In fact, our low death rate did not come from the lockdown, but only because we are a remote island nation.

Along with the national cabinet, she resorted frequently to the mantra “we are all in this together”, while collecting to the very last cent her high salary and generous accoutrements.

She failed to acknowledge that most of the leaks of the virus into Australia were the result of her government’s negligence concerning the Ruby Princess fiasco and the entry of the delta variant.

She gave NSW some of the trappings of a police State, while laws were almost daily made by the stroke of a pen, without any of the checks and balances essential in a parliamentary democracy and considered appropriate and proper in NSW even before federation.

And all the while, businesses, careers and even lives of far too many innocents were seriously and unnecessarily damaged and even destroyed.

The former premier belongs to the self-styled “moderate” faction of the Liberal party. From their agenda, they might as well be called the Marxist faction.

These are the LINOs, Liberals In Name Only, who would horrify founder Sir Robert Menzies.

Central to their current program is the unproven and discredited global warming theory.

The principal result so far has been to make our once cheap and reliable electricity one of the more expensive in the world. As expert scientist Ian Plimer argues, this is the “biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred”.

Much “climate science”, he says is “political ideology dressed up as science”.

Four decades ago Ayn Rand wrote that having demonstrated that Marxism could never supply the abundance they promised and which only free enterprise can, Marxists reversed their position.

Rather than promising abundance, they denounced it, scaring people out of their wits with some unknown cosmic cataclysm, which has become global warming.

BUSHFIRES

So bushfires made worse because of government mismanagement of forests is blamed on global warming as are water shortages caused by governmental failure to build dams.

The Liberals’ Marxist faction has adopted this and each and every dogma which flows into the country from the increasingly powerful American Marxists who have ensured, by hook or by crook, that the unworthy Biden would be President.

Along with the global warming fraud, the great failure of the Berejiklian government was to allow the control of education to be consolidated into the hands of Marxists.

They have ensured history and values disappeared from the curriculum to be replaced by the latest dogmas on race and sex (to avoid biological truth now called “gender”) pouring in from the American elites.

The result is a dramatic and continuing decline in standards of literacy, mathematics and science proven by international comparisons.